Some fun with Ubuntu sandboxes

 Yesterday, since it was a depressing wet and cold day, I spent part of the afternoon upgrading my Lenovo IdeaPad from the previous version of Ubuntu, Jammy Jellyfish, to Noble Numbat, the new version with long term support.

The upgrade went well, the machine rebooted cleanly at the end of the upgrade process and everything worked well, apart from one app - Notable.

This is a little bit unfortunate, for me at least, as Notable is one of the components of my research toolkit.

I use it to create living documents when researching a topic. Notable allows me to organise these notes in a way that makes sense to me, and being markdown based its straightforward to take a note's content and convert it to an .odt or .docx document to insert into something else.

As always after an upgrade, I clicked round the various key applications and they all appeared to work with the exception of Notable.

It simply didn't start.

Now, I'm no longer any sort of Linux expert but I do remember the basics of problem solving.

First of all I tried running it from a terminal, which produced this slightly scary message

which did not look good. I didn't understand the implications but I got the key message - the new version of Ubuntu is using application containers to stop wayward applications writing somewhere where they shouldn't, and this time around the container helper application was not correctly configured.

After a bit of googling I found there was a --no-sandbox argument one could add to the command line but that seemed a bit clunky as an option.

So I tried option B - reinstalling the application using the .deb from the developer website. Didn't work - in retrospect that was probably a silly idea as the installer hadn't been updated for some time, and would have no 'awareness' of the sandbox requirement.

So. option C - try installing from the Snap Store - this worked, but left me with two Notable icons, one to the 'bad' un-sandboxed install, and one to the 'good' install.

I couldn't work out how to get rid of the 'bad' icon, so I simply pinned the 'good' icon to the taskbar, and I'll try and find a fix later - for the moment I've a working tool and I'm happy.

I guess that the better way of doing this (and I have not tried this - I don't feel like experimenting at the moment) is before upgrading to Noble Numbat 

• copy your data somewhere safe 
• uninstall notable 
• upgrade 
• install notable from the snap store 
• re-import your data...

The Lake View House documentation project has restarted

 The Lake View house documentation project has restarted after a bit of a hiatus over winter with the discovery of a suspected black mould problem.

When the project was paused I was in the middle of documenting a nightstand in the main bedroom, and I finished off the documentation yesterday with a rather fine chamber pot made by W.A. Adderley in England.

As Adderley’s changed their potters marks reasonably often we can date this to somewhere between 1886 and 1905, which helps make the point that even in quite middle class and well to do houses in rural Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, indoor plumbing was unusual, and a night time trip to the loo would have involved a trip in the dark to the outhouse at the bottom of the yard - hardly an inviting prospect on a cold and wet winter’s night - explaining the continued use of chamber pots.

It also explains the presence of a hip bath in the kitchen. (I havn't yet documented the kitchen, which is in a separate brick building to reduce the risk of fire spreading to the main house.)

Having a bath was a major undertaking requiring water to be heated on the range, and having a bath in the kitchen - which would be warmer in winter - makes perfect sense.

Besides the chamber pot I documented some Guerlain pasteware from Limoges and a rather nice early twentieth century oil lamp made by Sherwood’s in Birmingham.

And this reinforces something I observed while documenting Dow’s pharmacy - prior to world war one, most manufactured products in Australia were imported, usually from the UK. 

Between the wars and in the immediate post world war two period you see a lot of import substitution with locally made items replacing imported goods and then, from the 1960s onwards one sees local brands being taken over by overseas conglomerates with production being moved offshore to countries with lower production costs.

On a technical note I also used the revived Lumix to photograph the artefacts, rather than the point and shoot Nikon I used document the contents of Dow’s. Using a small lightweight DSLR camera definitely works better documenting larger artefacts and pieces of furniture, although for small objects such as bottles and jars, the Nikon is more than adequate.

Haval Jolion

 I don't normally do car reviews, but when we were in FNQ we ended up with a surprisingly impressive Chinese made SUV, I thought I'd review it:

Renting a car is always a lottery - you might think you’ve reserved a particular size or model of car, and you of course end up with something completely different.

This time, in FNQ we had booked a Kia compact. Being realists we knew that we would probably get something else, but hoped for a compact at least, if only because of the ease of parking it in underground hotel and apartment car parks which always seem to be a bit smaller than ideal.

Well we didn’t.

We ended up with a Haval Jolion, a mid sized SUV made in China by Great Wall Motors.

I’ve never driven a Chinese made car before, but when I’ve ridden in a cheap MG they seemed a little tinny and flimsy, with a noisy transmission - a bit like the little Hyundai Getz’s you used to see as base rental cars.

The Jolion was none of these. It felt substantial and well made.

The inside was bit plasticky but the seats were good, the transmission was smooth, and it had a manual emulation mode like our old Subaru Impreza, so that you could control the gear changes on a steep or rough road.

Basically, I came away impressed by the vehicle’s capability.

And there’s a story here:

When Japanese cars first came on the market they were basic (I know, I learned to drive in a Datsun1200) and had problems such as being prone to corrosion, but they improved.

Dramatically.

Korean cars followed much of the same trajectory, with the original ones being derived from old Japanese models, one the first original designs like old Hyundai Excel I owned years ago while nice to drive was fairly basic. Both Japanese and Korean made cars now dominate and are regarded as quality vehicles.

At the same time I’ve driven a range of rental vehicles both here and in Europe, and apart from a couple of Renault Clios in Spain and Portugal I’ve never come across anything that I would ever think of buying, and in the case of one vehicle, the VW Taigo we had in Italy last year, most definitely not - which was a bit of a surprise, as I though that on the whole VW made decent cars.

Having driven a Haval Jolion, all I can say is that if I was in the car trade I’d be worried.